“From Dark Ages to Darker Empires: Europe’s ‘Enlightenment’ in Global Perspective”  reversethegaze.substack.com, March 16, 2026

“The European Enlightenment was a rebellion, but it was first and foremost a European rebellion against the suffocating synthesis of feudal monarchies and Vatican authority that had defined the continent’s “Dark Ages.” It was not the moment when humanity collectively switched on the lights; it was when one room in a very large civilizational house finally found the main switch—helped, incidentally, by neighbors it preferred to forget later.

Between the age of medieval church‑dominated scholarship and the 18th‑century Enlightenment thinkers lies a story of transmission as much as transformation: Europe receiving Greek philosophical and scientific traditions filtered through Arab intermediaries, drawing on knowledge systems that had also conversed—directly or indirectly—with Bharatiya, Chinese and other Asian traditions. To label this process “The Enlightenment” as if it were the singular and definitive awakening of humanity is not just historically provincial; it presupposes that everyone else was also stumbling in the dark, awaiting European illumination.

Two assumptions lurk behind the triumphalist Western narrative. First, that ideals such as reason, critical inquiry, and human dignity were not already articulated elsewhere in other forms. Second, that once Europe codified them, it faithfully carried these ideals to the rest of the world as a sort of moral export commodity, raising “backward” civilizations to its level. The historical record of colonialism, slavery, and racialized hierarchy shows something rather different: Enlightenment as a powerful local paradigm, aggressively universalized, frequently betrayed in practice, and rarely subjected to serious dialogue with alternative civilizational grammars….”

Read the full article on reversethegaze.substack.com